Will Pop Eat Itself? (Pop Music In The Soundbite Era)

gotta get this book now.

PWEI is one of my favorite bands.

also a big fan of KLF and the like.

any more info on the book?

artdamages said:

Ineresting book esp in relation to the 'hauntology' thing cause too me that stuff is mourning (maybe not knowingly) the sample-house/'ardcore/beats n breaks hip-hop/etc utopia that record companies and "intellectual property rights" killed. makes me sad.

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Nah, sampling in dance music killed itself. The whole cheesy bootleg craze and a million Prince Paul imitators (Avalanches, Bent, etc,) Obvious samples suddenly seemed liked the most played out wank ever. That's why electroclash seemed so fresh. The attitude was like: fuck the baggy, eclectic, "laid back" late 80's/90's, no breakbeats, no ecstacy, no mainstream house/techno influences after 1990 lets get cold.
Of course, this became a cliche in itself...

I like all the nineties stuff that was kind of synthetic and futuristic sounding like Timbaland, 2step, some handbag house/garage, minimal techno/ french touch, some stuff on warp/rephlex but...all that post-baggy trip hop, breakbeats, mo wax dance music for students turns me off. Too "rock" I suppose.
I dunno, sampling still seems played out. I think it's interesting that the new T.I. song samples a house tune, though. But it keeps the tempo slow so that it's not a house tune in itself.

swears said:

I dunno, sampling still seems played out.

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At the risk of sounding annoyingly didactic or overly simplistic, I'd add:

Don't forget that entire swaths of music are created from samples (i.e., separate samples/sound files for hi-hats, ride cymbals, snares, kicks, toms, rolls, even the 'air' in between percussive hits; atmospherics and atmospheric sounds, instrumental lines, hiss, vocal melodies from unrelated genres, noises and quotes from film, obscure instruments, etc etc etc on into the night).

I know producers who won't use a single percussion sound that's not built from a sample of some sound source, because for them this is where the artistry lies, the creativity, the connoisseurship, the craft. Yet the final outcome sounds entirely like the musical imagination of that particular producer.

Sampling-as-citation, which seems to be what you are objecting to here, is only one part of the sampling continuum. One of my all-time favorite leftfield jungle tunes has a beat built in part from a sampled typewriter! Same guy used a calypso vocal for another jungle tune, though you'd never know it was calypso from the final output. Pinch's Qawwali is no doubt named what it is because of the genre whence the accordian-like sound (the instrument is called a harmonium) was sampled. Dev Paradox has gone so far as to say that the texture not only of drum sounds but even film audio in the 1970s is identifiable, and specific to the sound that he is trying to achieve (and for this reason his track titles frequently pay homage to the sampled source).

OTM, tate.

Tate said:

One of my all-time favorite leftfield jungle tunes has a beat built in part from a sampled typewriter! Same guy used a calypso vocal for another jungle tune, though you'd never know it was calypso from the final output.

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might you be talking about jason os?

Tate said:

At the risk of sounding annoyingly didactic or overly simplistic, I'd add:

Don't forget that entire swaths of music are created from samples (i.e., separate samples/sound files for hi-hats, ride cymbals, snares, kicks, toms, rolls, even the 'air' in between percussive hits; atmospherics and atmospheric sounds, instrumental lines, hiss, vocal melodies from unrelated genres, noises and quotes from film, obscure instruments, etc etc etc on into the night).

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Yeah, I understand that producers sample short stabs or hits for percussion as opposed to longer loops that stretch out over bars. (I tinker around on music software myself.) And obviously there are a lot of tunes out there that I like that feature samples. But I think on the whole that musicians are going to have to turn away from that for things to move foward.
I have a thing against "realistic" sounding drums for some reason. I prefer drum sounds that are sharp and hard and built from scratch.
If this makes any sense, I often think of musical sounds like textures. And I always seem to pick "textures" like chrome, plastic and glass over wood, wool and soil.
I'm sorry if this sounds a bit odd!

pokinatcha said:

might you be talking about jason os?

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Yes, exactly. The tune with the calypso sample is "Panama" (Cymbalism), the one with the sampled typewriter is called (not surprisingly) "Clark Nova," and should be out on Counter Intelligence later this year.

It may be worth noting that Jason oS' approach to (sampling) environmental sounds is philosophically similar to Blackdown's idea of "keysounds," though both arrived at them independently.